“We will carefully watch over those who will rule. As we have always done, we will be a critical conscience”. This is how, at the end of the general meeting of the Italian Bishops, card. Gualtiero Bassetti, archbishop of Perugia-Città della Pieve and president of the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI), answered to the press that asked him about the current political scenario. “All that is good – he pointed out about the new government – we will appreciate, but, as to all that is against family life, people, migrants, we will be a critical voice”. “This doesn’t mean we will not assist them”, the cardinal specified: “We are willing to assist them but not in a sort of collaboration. We have the Gospel that enlightens us, we don’t want to be smoke, we want to be fire, as the Pope asked us to: and fire warms and if needed it can burn”. Then the president of CEI listed some “irremovable boundaries that are non-renounceable principles: the centrality of the human being; work as the foundation of human personality; the actual enforcement of the Constitution; a clear choice for democracy and for Europe”. “The polestar – he added – is the Catholics’ fresh commitment that social justice is built upon, according to the principles of the social doctrine of the Church”. Then, the list of such principles: “Work, to be ensured through full employment; fair wages; welfare; social security and healthcare; education”. Bassetti seemed to indirectly refer to the “flat tax” too, when he included, among the principles of the social doctrine of the Church, “progressive taxation”, which means “not cutting for its own sake, but cutting on the groups that need to be cut, with higher taxes on speculative transactions”. And then: “The fight against any form of unlawfulness; the social inclusion of all the people who live as outcasts; the citizens’ involvement in political and social life”. As to this list, he pointed out that these are “non-renounceable principles that are all part of the social doctrine of the Church”. “It’s not the Italian Bishops Conference that invented them”, he remarked: “There’s a catechism for the truths of the faith, but there’s also a catechism for social life”.